Professor Masato Sakai of the Faculty of Humanities, Yamagata University announced that he has discovered a new ground painting on the Nazca Plateau in the Republic of Peru.

 The Nazca Survey Team at Yamagata University discovered a new geoglyph, "Animals with a stretched tongue," in a field survey of the Nazca Plateau in Peru in 2015.The place is in the central part of the Nasca plateau, and the total length of the ground painting is about 30 meters.There is a spot-like pattern on the torso, and it is characterized by a large number of protrusions that look like legs extending from the torso.It is believed that fantasy animals were drawn, not real animals.

 The geoglyph of this "animal with a stretched tongue" is composed of a white surface with pebbles on the surface removed in a surface shape and a black surface with the removed pebbles piled up. It can be said that it is a feature of the geoglyphs before the Nasca period and the late Paracas (around 400 to 200 BC).

 In the immediate vicinity of the geoglyphs, there is a geoglyph of the "scene of decapitation" previously discovered by a research team at Yamagata University, both of which are drawn on a gentle slope using the same technique, so the height of the human eye is high. From this, the shape of the geoglyph can be identified. Since there is an old road between the two geoglyphs and the great temple "Kawachi" at that time, it is thought that the two geoglyphs were drawn along the pilgrimage route to the Kawachi temple.

 In addition, at the Citizens' Exchange Room Agora on the 1st floor of the Faculty of Humanities, Yamagata University, an exhibition "Achievements of the Nasca Institute attached to the Faculty of Humanities" including this discovery will be held.We are calling for the general public to visit.

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Yamagata University is one of the largest comprehensive national universities in eastern Japan, with six faculties: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Regional Education and Culture, Faculty of Science, Faculty of Medicine, Faculty of Engineering, and Faculty of Agriculture. Under the theme of "coexistence of nature and humans," the three missions of "regional revitalization, next-generation formation, and multicultural coexistence" and the educational theory of "cultivating human resources with rich humanity" [...]

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